I got one Mini ape from Aune last Thursday and have used it for some days now.

So far it works very well! It is easy to use, easy understandable, good sound and ease/fast to operate. I think the Chinese have done a good job with this player! It also looks good(and small).

I use it together with a external hard disk with folders containing wav files. It is easy to look trough all the folders and play the songs that I want.

I am using the mini ape with a Hifidiy.net pcm1794 dac. The sound is very detailed, clear, dynamic, and not digital sounding. I have compared the mini ape to my old sony X7ESD cd player(using coax output). The sony got a better soundstage/wider sound, more detailed and clear, with the dac. But it is still beaten by the mini ape as a transport. The mini ape have a more black background, even wider soundstage and more detailes.

The mini ape I got have a display that is a bit hard to read when I am 3-4 meters away, but the chinese tells me that they will change the display to a OLED or TFT display in the future.

The remote control is small and handy, and easy to use.

I think this player is a very interesting product. It is easy to use, can play "everything"(SD card, hard drive or usb stick conatining music) and have a very good sound

How much information is displayed on that small screen on the mini APE player? The display on the QA350/550 has so little information that it is almost useless. Would this be suitable for a terabyte hard drive with 2000 CDs' worth of music? Could you actually navigate a lot of files and folders? There is no picture of the display powered up on their web site, so it's hard to tell.

It sounds really good to me, at least as good as my WDTV with a PCM1793 dac w/ upgraded op-amp. Plenty good enough to get rid of my CD player, and have a terabyte of music right at my fingertips all the time. I'm not a hyper-audiophile, just a music lover, so take it for what it's worth. Very clear, detailed sound and plenty of bass. Pretty high level of output, too (2v). Overloads my MiniDSP, even at the high-level input setting. I made a set of RCA cables last night w/10k resistors in them, which should solve the problem.

It is a fairly small package, so no room inside for any kind of disk drive. I am going to make an old-school leather case for it, sort of like an old camera case, and have a pouch on the side where the portable 1TB drive can live. Should be portable enough for car use on longer trips.

It is a little confusing to operate, and you seem to need both the remote and the front buttons to do everything. Manual is pretty badly translated, and so, pretty confusing. Fortunately, it's manageable to operate.

It does not like Mac-formatted disks. OS 10.6 allows for FAT32-formatted disks, so that's an easy problem to solve. Scrolling through a long list of folders is slow, and its push, push, push. No automatic scrolling. I'll be rearranging things to have folders A-Z, so that should make for quicker navigation.

Despite its user-interface shortcomings, a pretty fantastic unit for the money, and it definitely has a quality feel. Hits the sweet spot for me, anyway.

For me, portability plus a built-in screen. I think they are similar sonically, depending on the dac. The Wolfson in there seems pretty good, but undoubtedly there are better.

I built a little unit that stacks up a power supply x3 (for WDTV, DAC and TV monitor), then the WDTV, then the DAC, then the hard drive, and finally, on top, a 4.3" TFT car backup camera monitor. Turns out to be half the size of a toaster, which is transportable, but too bulky to be useful in a car, which the Aune ought to work for. All that stuff added up to about $300, the price of the Aune.

The WDTV needs a monitor. And since it's designed for home theater use, it really likes a BIG monitor. Text on my little monitor is really tiny and hard to read. Functional, but a bit of a problem. I could have gone with a 7" monitor, but that would have made the whole thing bigger. If you're using it where there's a TV available, no problem, but otherwise it's an issue. There seem to be people rewriting the software for the WDTV, but there seems to be issues from what I've come across.